Unfortunately for the (probably small) population that has used Amazon Drive as their primary cloud storage solution, Amazon has decided to end the service. The good news is that you have plenty of time to come up with a plan B and successfully implement the transition.
I was working on an article about online storage solutions for real estate agents and had planned to include my favorite, Amazon Drive, when I ran across this article. So, I’m putting this news out now and I’ll publish that article in the near future. And, I’ll most likely be using one of the other solutions I write about in that upcoming article.
Amazon Drive will no longer be available after December 31, 2023, according to an announcement made by the company. After that day, you will be unable to access the account by any means.
“We will continue to provide customers the ability to safely back up, share, and organize photos and videos,” the business assured in an email to users about Amazon Photographs’ capabilities. You will, however, need to do some downloading in order to access anything that is not a photograph or a movie. Amazon recommends that users download the Amazon Photos desktop software for either Windows or macOS in order to manage larger files. You also have the option to cancel your Drive membership right from this page if you so want.
After 11 years, Amazon has made the decision to discontinue support for Drive. According to the company’s statement, “we are taking the opportunity to more fully focus our efforts on Amazon Photos to provide customers with a dedicated solution for photo and video storage.” If this is the case, it may be an indication that Amazon plans to compete with Google Photos and Apple’s iCloud Photo Library by introducing ground-breaking new capabilities. Those users who have grown accustomed to storing their files on Amazon’s safe servers will be extremely disappointed by the revelation about Drive.
